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Can you say what the Government will do to support people in the scenario that I have outlined? I do not know the answer to that question.

Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for your frank opening statement, Mr Jones—we do not often hear one of those in committees. However, having said that, I want to ask you the following. You have just repeated the phrase that you treat the Auditor General’s report as “balanced and accurate”. The report’s opening gambit is that

“The ongoing poor performance of the contract is resulting in delays and inefficiencies across the justice sector, impacting on policing, prison services and the courts.”

Is that a balanced and accurate description of your operating performance?

The contract said that you needed between 650 and 700 officers but, at the lowest point, you had only 510, so of course that will put pressure on your ability to deliver services. That is not anyone else’s fault but your own.

It sounds as if you have unfortunately found yourself in a perfect storm.

Of course, the obvious solution to that is to improve the package that you offer your staff. Retention would surely improve off the back of that, although that might come at a cost to your profit margin. Do you get the impression that you have bitten off more than you can chew with this contract here in Scotland?

I have the cold, but I will try to struggle through this.

I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The Scottish Government estimates that it will cost £33 billion to deliver its heat in buildings strategy. We know from the Auditor General for Scotland’s report that around £1.8 billion of public funding has been committed, but I understand that £600 million of that is as yet unallocated and that around £0.5 billion of it is dedicated to supporting people who are in fuel poverty. That does not leave much for physical intervention. I guess that less than £1 billion of public money is going into physical intervention to move homes towards the strategy. My overarching question is: where will the other £32 billion come from?

Absolutely. The 2.5 million occupied homes account for 15 per cent of Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions, using that phraseology. That is not the lion’s share of our emissions as a country, and it sounds to me that we are asking those with the least to do the most in this scenario and that legislation will force them to do so.

Let me give you a practical example because, out there in the real world, people want to know what all of this means for their household. My flat in Greenock is in a Victorian tenement with six flats, most of which are poorly insulated. None of them is double-glazed, and all of them run on gas boilers—to various extents of success, I should add. In that scenario, when the Government says, “Right, we’ve changed the law and you’re all going to have to move to some new green energy system, although we don’t know what it is yet,” the first question that all my neighbours will ask me is, “How much is that going to cost me, because I don’t have any money right now?”

The average price of a property in the streets that I am talking about is about £35,000. You will crash the property market in that area if you suddenly require people to put in five £10,000 heating systems.

Let us look at some of that in the context of the fact that GEOAmey has received £4 million of financial penalties due to its performance issues. Since 2021, it has been served with five improvement notices on specific issues. That is the backdrop that we are working against here.

You have just responded by saying that there are two reasons for that. One is the one that you are leading on, by selectively quoting from the Auditor General’s report, which is the changing operating environment that you work in. I do not underestimate how challenging that is for you. However, for me, the main driver seems to be staffing issues, which we will come on to later in more detail. Surely, as a company that operates in the service industry, working with public sector organisations, you also operate in other jurisdictions. It sounds to me a little bit as though you have gone into the contract here in Scotland with your eyes wide shut. Surely the challenging changes of scenario in contract terms that you operate in would have been known to you at the time of entering into the contract. It sounds to me as though you are saying that the failures are everyone else’s fault but your own.

I know that others will want to come in, and we have lots of questions for you today. First, however, I will say that I spent two years on the Scottish Parliament’s Criminal Justice Committee and I know that, although the majority of stakeholders in the courts and in the prisons whom the committee met when we visited those places in person spoke very highly of the individuals who work in your organisation—it is important to put that on the record—they had very few positive comments to make about the company in general.

To go back to my first question, GEOAmey is an experienced organisation in the public sector, with large contracts in other jurisdictions, so why on earth did you go into a contract that was so tight that it did not allow you the flexibility to change the contract terms or operating model as the environment that you worked in changed? Clearly, it has changed substantially—in your view, it has changed more than it should have, according to the contract that you went into. You must employ some pretty decent solicitors to help with the contract wording and commercial negotiations, so why does the contract not allow for those substantial changes in the environment that you work in?